Style

Do you know the movie Single White Female, where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Hedra super creepily assumes the look/style/identity of Bridget Fonda’s Allie? Sometimes I think, There but for the grace of God go I because I will occasionally fixate on some piece of clothing in a friend’s closet, and scheme and machinate until I can somehow, someday–insert hideous cackling here, please–make it my own.

This was the case with my friend Alanna’s black seersucker dress. I first laid eyes on it in July 2010, on what was surely one of the hottest days of the summer. Alanna looked even cooler and prettier than she usually does and I decided, Hedra-style, that if only I could get that dress, I would be cool and pretty, too! However: Alanna’s dress was not only from Makie (too rich for my Yankee blood) but also, perhaps more the point, had come from a long-since-over sample sale.

Still, for almost two years, my mind refused to loosen its death grip on the idea of that dress–which only grew tighter every time I saw Alanna wear it last summer. I realized that the best way to get a similar-bordering-on-Single-White-Female version of the dress was to make it myself (I know how to sew; see aforementioned Yankee blood). A few Google image searches later (“vintage raglan sleeve dress pattern” and “70s raglan sleeve dress pattern), I found this for $6 and ordered it from the awesome site http://www.serendipityvintage.com/. (Warning, you can get sucked into some pretty serious procrasturbating looking through their 60s and 70s styles. Hello, Vogue pattern for men’s terry cloth shorts.)

Then I ordered black seersucker from fabrics.com. One Friday night, two hours, and eight seams later, I will now enter summer 2012 with a very close replica of Alanna’s dress. I plan on making myself another, in a different color. And, as a thank you for letting me so shamelessly nip her flavor, I’m going to make a white seersucker version for Alanna.

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Comments (3)

good job!
i recently had a similar experience after coveting a dress made by a little store on the lower east side that was just a little more than i could afford. it seemed like a fairly simple pattern, so after some procrasturbating i found these japanese pattern books with the perfect pattern and i now have a similar dress in a few different colors.http://www.etsy.com/shop/JapanLovelyCrafts?section_id=7119211

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